Rispah, 2nd Book of Samuel, Chapter 21 (Liber Studiorum, part IX, plate 46)

Joseph Mallord William Turner

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Turner distilled his ideas about landscape In "Liber Studiorum" (Latin for Book of Studies), a series of seventy prints plus a frontispiece published between 1807 and 1819. To establish the compositions, he made brown watercolor drawings, then etched outlines onto copper plates. Professional engravers usually developed the tone under Turner's direction, and Dunkarton here added mezzotint to describe a gruesome Old Testament subject. After the death of King Saul, his sons by his concubine Rizpah were executed by the Gibeonites, and left unburied. Their mother here protects the corpses, using a torch to ward off an approaching lion at night. The letter "H" in upper margin indicates Turner's category of Historical landscape.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art